Social Media Policy

Use social media policy template to draft guidelines for use of social media at workplace and personally.

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What is a Social Media Policy?

A social media policy is an official document suggesting the intended use of an organization’s social media handles.

It covers the brand’s official channels as well as how employees use social media professionally and personally.

This policy covers everyone from CEO to interns to promote understanding.

Why do employees need Social Media Policy?

A social media policy is an essential document to maintain a company’s social media handles.

Some of the reasons to implement this policy in an organization:

1. Maintain Brand Identity

It helps to maintain brand identity across various social media platforms like Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook etc. This policy keeps things consistent and uniform across every platform. In an organization it is necessary to maintain uniformity.

2. Protection from legal and regulatory challenges

It protects employees from falling into legal traps. The consequences of breaking them may result in legal action against the employees. The legal action can be against insider trading done by employees or data breach of organization.

3. Prevent a security breach

A well defined social policy along with required security protocols can help to protect users’ confidential data against unethical hacking, phishing and impostor accounts. Security guidelines include frequent change of passwords that meet standards along with 2 factor authentication.

4. Respond quickly if breach or crisis happen

Despite your efforts a breach or crisis can still happen. Sometimes the breach or crisis has nothing to do with social media, still it should be reported to social media channels.

It ensures you have an emergency plan in place.

5. Clarify responsibilities of employees towards social media

It helps to clarify the responsibilities of employees towards social media. It conveys what employees have to do and what they have to avoid in regard to social media. It can vary from organization to organization.

6. Encourage employees to amplify brand’s message

When a company has achieved something big it is important to communicate with the whole board through social media.

If someone has your company name in their bio, does that mean your brand endorses their drunken Vegas vacation? A clear social media policy for employees helps your team know what they can and should share on social media, and what they should skip.

How to implement social media policy?

To implement a social media policy a series of steps had to be followed:

1. Establish the guidelines

An organization must decide what its social media policy is including the guidelines. This involves getting inputs from HR, stakeholders, IT staff as well as the legal department.

2. Assign roles and responsibilities

Roles should be assigned to every individual. This might include charging IT with handling security systems and the legal department with legal responsibilities. Once all roles have been assigned a sheet has to be created defining roles of every individual employee.

3. Distribute it

It should be easily accessible to employees and public also if required.

Employees should not face any difficulty in accessing these policies.

4. Update policy regularly

Companies should update social media policies with ongoing trends. It can be annually or quarterly. This is necessary because social media regularly updates itself. So it is important for companies to update their social media policies regularly.

5. Enforce it

In order to enforce social media policy a concerned authority should be assigned. This process involves sending employees regular updates and reminders and watching the imposter accounts that are not following policy.

Social media policy template

XYZ Corporation Ltd (Name of the company)

Social media policy

XYZ Corporation Ltd has adopted the following guidelines for social media, website and blog

We will strive to have open communication with our readers.
We will protect the privacy of our customers and readers.
We will correct inaccurate or misleading information timely.
We will not delete comments and posts until they violate our organization’s norms
We will disclose conflicts of interest.
We will credit our sources of information wherever necessary.
We will respect intellectual property rights.
We will review comments regularly and take appropriate action against the unnecessary ones.
We will approve and reply to all the relevant comments related to the post.
We will not post recommended specific investment products in our social media posts or blogs.
We welcome third party relevant comments on our social media posts and blogs.

Mr X

Signing officer (ABC Ltd)